


Vestiges who call

by susundeku



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Courtship, F/M, Friendship/Love, Grief, Growth, Hurt/Comfort, Indulgence as a theme, Intimacy, Lots of interiority and a healthy lot of emotions, Moving On, Post-Canon, Romance, Slow Burn, Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:15:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26794978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/susundeku/pseuds/susundeku
Summary: "It’s a great offer, Mikasa. Never mind the prestige, you’d be living amongst technology that’s decades ahead of us. You’d have the protection of the political connections they have already made, you could start a family safely.""That’s the outlook of a queen." She turns her head away again and spots Historia’s family, now lying on the grass, pointing up at the clouds. "Maybe, a mother.""Then what’s yours?"-Ten years after the war, remnants of the past call for her. Mikasa answers one. First, she makes friends with indecision and its victims’ keeper, Levi.
Relationships: Mikasa Ackerman/Levi
Comments: 23
Kudos: 78





	1. Unlike illusion, you make a sound

**Author's Note:**

> They manifest their monikers in such brilliant, different ways, that you can’t help but put them side by side. Here lies the fruits of my weary exhaustion with the stupid and magnificent entanglement of humans.
> 
> Warning: manga spoilers ahead!

Even as she knocks on the door, Mikasa still doesn’t know the reason why Historia called her to her house instead of her throne, but she does know what it is she wants to discuss.

Her eyes are as bright as ever when she swings open the door and looks up toward her visitor. Everything about her is lighter; the way she holds herself, the step in her gait, the set of her shoulders. It’s a misleading look on a leader, but she’s glad for her. It’s a good thing that she doesn’t have to salute her queen looking less regal and more like a too-young mother of a too-young child anymore.

"Mikasa! Take a seat right there," Historia gestures to the table and chair set on the porch, "I’ll bring out some tea."

She does as told and looks out toward the open pasture before her. The house isn’t Historia’s childhood home but it is close. It’s her partner’s, some boy from her childhood, so it must bring her comfort.

Historia returns eagerly and pushes the tray laden with the tea set onto the table when Mikasa catches sight of a man and a child, playing on the grass. With the child’s blond hair resembling Historia’s to a startling degree, it’s easy to mistake the kid for Historia herself, as an infantile youth no older than five years.

But the illusion is only visual, because she can feel it in her bones, the all-too-fleeting way youth has surpassed them, made them hard and wise faster than ten years can warrant.

So this reprieve, as everyone is calling it, is least suited for people like them. They’ve managed to stop the forward momentum of chaos and devastation but there are too many paths to choose from now. Well, she supposes, it doesn’t feel as suffocating for some.

Historia has followed Mikasa’s line of vision, and is now staring upon the same sight. A man and a child. In Historia’s eyes, her family. Functional. Peaceful. And most gratifyingly, liberated.

Mikasa starts drinking her tea when the objects of their perusal spot them and begin waving. As Historia turns to her again, Mikasa sets down her cup. "Are you happy?"

"Yes. I never thought I wouldn’t be." Her comment is so matter-of-fact that Mikasa grimaces. It seems like a delusion, because how could anyone be happy to repeat cycles of unearned suffering? How could you fool yourself into assuming pride with the duty? She might be happy now, but she was miserable at first.

"I don’t believe you, your Majesty," Mikasa delivers, deadpan.

Historia merely giggles fondly. "You don’t need to call me that, your Highness," she says, playfully, waits for Mikasa’s frown to set in, and then begins again, more seriously, "It’s a great offer, Mikasa. Never mind the prestige, you’d be living amongst technology that’s decades ahead of us. You’d have the protection of the political connections they have already made, you could start a family safely."

"That’s the outlook of a queen." She turns her head away again and spots Historia’s family, now lying on the grass, pointing up at the clouds. "Maybe, a mother."

"Then what’s yours?"

She knew the question was coming, but it’s like she needed to hear it voiced to let herself unleash all the emotions it implicates. If she were higher society, she would call it insolence. The people of Hizuru needed wealth of natural resources, they found her and stamped themselves as one to bring themselves closer. They needed a boost in the nation’s morale, a figurehead, a marble statue to worship, they found her again.

Yes, they call on her and reserve only the most respectable language for use in her presence, but what do they know? They have not bothered to find out her loyalty to a boy who has died. A boy who destroyed half of the world to save it. It should be obvious but it isn’t, to them. They know so little because they do not care. They heard that the girl who played a hand in saving the world was idle, and they made haste to stake their claim.

"It isn’t home."

Historia’s small smile, rid of all the mirth of her previous ones, tells her that she understands. A home carries its own connotations from person to person, and Mikasa had many. Historia only got a glimpse of one of Mikasa’s, but it’s enough that she doesn’t say anything else.

Mikasa thinks about her mother and the boundless warmth that she provided, the home her family made together, and then what flimsy connection to her mother is left now. It seems counterintuitive to bid farewell to the place they created their household, and chase material promises of one somewhere else. But it doesn’t change the cruel reality that all her homes have crumbled and vanished. Vestiges of one will be vestiges. Incomplete, but undeniable constituents.

Precious, if you choose to see so.

"I need time."

Historia’s eyes are wide and receiving. Mikasa pointedly does not look at them.

"I’ll see to it then."

Mikasa nods and performs her salute. There is still too much tea left but she walks away.

\---

It’s a few weeks later that Levi breaks into her house. It’s dramatic and loud because he wants to be, but it doesn’t make her move. He parts the curtains, exposing the room to the sun, and steps over to her motionless figure on the bed and rips the blankets off of her.

Last week it was Connie, and the week before, the same week she visited Historia, it was Jean. The latter eager to know her response to the ambassadors on the island, the former coming in as rear support when a rundown Jean took the brunt of her irritability with indecision like the vanguard charging in blind.

Two days ago, it was also Jean. Defences recovered, all no-nonsense and years’ worth of intuition up his sleeve. She let him stay but didn’t say anything on the subject.

Levi is a different kind of opponent altogether.

"Get up."

"No. I’m tired."

"Get up," he repeats, his tone the least bit deterred.

She knows he has the stamina to wear her down so she lets her defences fall a bit; it’ll save her the effort. She’s been stewing in her own misery for so long that it spills out easily enough. "I’m tired, Levi. Of giving pieces of myself to everyone and getting nothing back."

She isn’t weak. She’s tired. There’s a difference there that he doesn’t need explained. The strong can tire and he is all too aware of that fact. Unlike those lesser than them, who, when they cower, can crumble on the spot, they suffer the ill fate to be worn down like boulders within landslides, they keep tumbling and pushing until they are hidden beneath too much amassed rubble and are almost gone. Pieces of themselves, as she said.

Her circle of friends and acquaintances, loyal subjects and squad of allies, extend further than she cares for it to. What they want from her does not stem from love of her person. They’ll take what they need and leave her in her ashes. Her strength. Her blood that trickles down and pools around ‘her people’ knee-deep in worship. Her unflappable familiarity. So she lets them have that, knows not to give them her warmth.

She doesn’t say that it’s probably because even the people she really loved only wanted her love, and not her. She doesn’t express that deep, dark insecurity because it sounds like a complication and not a resolution to the problem. As it is, she feels destroyed enough.

"Then why not stop it?"

"I can’t…yet. That’s why I want to rest," she says, as she slings her arm over her eyes, "Let me rest."

"What makes you think you’re getting nothing back?" he pushes.

"Isn’t it obvious? No one could care less what happens to me. They only appreciate me for what I do for them."

"Is that so bad when you’re using them too?"

"What?"

"I said you’re using them, aren’t you? As your purpose to live." It’s this that finally makes her look toward him from where she lays.

Levi’s gaze is as solemn as ever, but beyond the almost-blank expression, the slant of his eyes is not so defined, not ruthless or scrutinising in the way he looked at every ‘vile pig’ they have ever had to interrogate. It is as relaxed as his eyes can be, the faintest of lines at the corners of his eyes. It bespeaks the sort of rapport they have come to build over the years. The respect and understanding from during the war developing behind the scenes to an unspoken attachment, a phenomenon all too natural between comrades who survived the rough of everything side by side.

Still, Mikasa wonders how he even makes the observation. It could be years of garnered intuition as a captain; a skill written into the role. Or it could just be that she is too plain to see, the perfect unquestioning soldier as long as the ones she loves are not implicated in the mess.

But she has not spent much time self-reflecting, looking in from the outside, to know what kind of person she has led others to believe she is. Her biggest points of self-worth are unshakeable, and because those are arguably her instincts and her strength, she has let them lead her through life, like two hands in her unceremonious undoing.

Whatever it is, she decides this is what makes them different. Strong as they both may be, he has reasons to go on, she supposes, that go beyond giving up pieces of himself to others so they may carry him like a candle, dismembered sticks of light that flicker with the life that others have lit into him. He has fallen comrades to honour—as much of a hand he has dealt in their deaths their kills count as sacrifices which he has never been hesitant to deal.

All because he has been chasing freedom and peace from much, much longer before the first twisted drop of blood of someone dear landed on his hands.

For Levi, it’s freedom. At first for himself, and then for everyone after.

It is a life of his she doesn’t know. Hasn’t really cared to ask about. But she knows it was probably a great deal of suffering—his past which connects to his present of new brands of torment—and she thinks it unfair that even still he should be stronger than her, and know how to keep going in this godforsaken world, just for himself.

_A self so indestructible it is surely a curse._

Her string of thought drags on for so long she almost forgets to reply. She doesn’t know what to say. Maybe this is what he wanted when he asked the question. To confront her that she has very much been doing the furthest thing away from living for herself. So they already both know who the cause of her discontent really is.

"Whatever," Mikasa deflects, "it doesn’t change the fact that I…I want more." She declares the last part with fervour and then, slowly, as if wary of his reprimanding, "I think I deserve more."

Now this is the part where he could call her selfish, or stupid, for rejecting the same lessons that come back to her in cycles and hurt her as badly each time. She needs to know her boundaries to keep herself intact. Because who is to fault when she gets nothing, not a thank you or a nod, for giving herself where it was not asked of her? He decides not to, because she will never learn if she is always taught in the same ways.

So Levi indulges her, and passively holds on to hope, as ready to throw it away as foolishly as he was to grab on. Let her learn from indulgence, the selfishness of her ways so she may change them and find stronger roots to grow from. In any case, she does deserve more. Just not in the way she specifically wants it.

"What about me?" He reveals nothing on his face which might enlighten her as to what he is alluding to.

So she asks dumbly, "What about you?"

"Am I one of them?" He rephrases, pointlessly, face still as characteristically bored as ever.

She stumbles for an answer, not because she doesn’t know it, but because it’s absurd that he should ask.

She has never wanted anything from him. Not for his saving or his consistently timely intervening that singlehandedly always stopped things from going further south. She cannot even ask him of reason, some salvaging justification for all his outlandish actions that had always seemed pitted against her and those she loved, because at the end of it all, she has come to understand his logic.

It is cold-hearted but it works. Or rather, it works because it is cold-hearted, (but it doesn’t mean he and his logic are one and the same. It doesn’t mean he wanted to be this way. It just _was_ the only way).

And this leads her to be quite certain that he, too, has wanted nothing from her. They have always kept their seats at opposite sides of a spectrum, lived their similar lives separately. He has never thought of needing her to survive, not anyone but himself.

"Of course not," Mikasa says, then wonders where he will go on from here.

After all, she is pretty sure they have accepted, for many years, a kind of conclusion, that though they are made of the same stone and ice, any differences were balanced out between the distance separating them. They have never had to meet in the middle and stay there, differences rippling promisingly violent under calm, hewn seams of skin every brief engagement they’d been forced into in the middle.

"Then what am I?"

"What do you want from me?" Her stare sharpens as the familiar flare of anger and frustration rises in her eyes, subtly so.

Obedience and respect are behaviours that resemble contracts between roles such as theirs; he has never _wanted_ her obedience—however wanting at times it was—it is written in script somewhere that he _should have,_ as her direct in command _,_ inherited it. So if there is anything of hers that he could desire, it must certainly be what he himself lacks.

But the truth of the matter is, he is strong enough on his own, which is why this feels strangely like he is in the middle of offering something to her. A demonstration of his abysmal capacity. What is being offered she is not so sure of yet. 

"Nothing, Mikasa. I just know how to give you what you deserve. It’s that simple." He turns toward the window and crosses his arms.

She finally sits up, chasing his gaze. "Why would you?"

He glances at her over his shoulder. "That’s step one right there." In the short second she is eluded into his false calm, he has her legs twisted and arms incapacitated as he drops her onto her ass on the floor. "Take a goddamned guess."

Her back leans against the side of the bed and he leans into her space, weight propped on her tangled legs and one arm holding both of hers behind her back. "Wasn’t aware you abandoned your head with your body when you confined yourself to bedrest like the invalid that you aren’t," he spits.

She would usually raise her hackles at his tone, but she has been under his command long enough to know that the sharper it gets, the more disdain he is trying to mask.

Except there is no thorn in their side, no mission jeopardised by some unanticipated opposition in this room. There is just him and her. So it is more than likely that his tone is hiding something from her; he is his own potential danger.

And she has a track record of eliminating those second-to-only-one, orders or not.

"So give it to me then." She doesn’t squirm in his hold or falter under his attention. Rather, she leans forward until there is so little space between their faces, Levi should be tempted to lean back. It is a challenge.

His eyes flicker once, down and up again. The deliberate heaviness of the action suggests that he is tempted to lean in a direction completely opposite to what Mikasa had imagined, but she refuses to misconstrue him that way. She has never seen this side of him so when her nerves jump, she sits on the tension and lets it puncture the room.

It is like the stifling pressure in the room is released when Levi releases his grip on her and says in the same breath, "I’m leaving tomorrow. To a tea plantation by the sea. It needs work and the shops there could use business." His breath washes over her face due to their persisting proximity and it smells like black tea. Ironic.

He finally lifts himself up. "You can hole yourself in here and wallow away ‘til you’re no better than those pompous pigs, too full of themselves to merit anyone’s respect." He looks down at her and not for the first time the man who she has always mocked for his meagre height makes her feel small. "Make the same decision a thousand times or you can make just the one: to honour what you have fought for."

She averts her gaze to the side. His honesty is too tall and deep-cutting because she shares the same sentiment, it just isn’t so often that she lets herself be bested beneath someone’s foot; hearing it now is nothing short of excruciating. "So you’re going to offer me as a volunteer. That sounds like a distraction," she mumbles.

"Possibly." He raises an eyebrow. "You can always ignore it if you don’t like it. It’s a choice. Not a command."

Even though he takes care to make the distinction, his presence in the room could not be any closer to commanding. His stature filled out in every way despite his compact size; Levi is not a slight man, and he fills her plain, unornamented bedroom in much the same way.

_Invincible,_ by the sole virtue of how he stands on his own two feet.

She can’t help but be drawn into the allure. It makes her feel fifteen again, an unconscious Eren at her side and the glorious silhouette of the sole soldier who had saved them. Unlike the past, this time she is compelled toward him, to follow him toward all ends that exist on the earth, because she knows she is strong but her strength has failed her where his has not, and there is something to learn from him.

It is not a command, no. What Mikasa is most grateful for is that it is an invitation, lacking the formal structure of one. Typical.

As she makes the observation, she thinks that it is tethers like these, simple and bordering fond, to the main figures in her life now (no matter how few there are left) that she wants to live for. This and his undiminishing strength are enough going forward for now.

"I’ll go." She’s more than accustomed to the sheer amount of trust he puts in his subordinates to choose the options of lesser regret. She picks herself up from the floor and seats herself on the bed and then says slowly, but surely "I’ll follow you, Captain."

"Not my subordinate anymore, Mikasa." He picks up the bedsheet from the floor and folds it neatly before handing it over to her. She accidentally lingers on his face for too long when she sees a quirk in the corners of his lips.

She’d seen him come close to smiling once before, out of relief, dare she say affection, but at the time she was more preoccupied with gloating after Historia duly gave him a taste of his own medicine.

The silence stretches on too long but she still fits in at the last-minute, "As long as you don’t start treating me like a royal."

He returns, without missing a beat, "You aren’t one yet, as far as I know. I’d be executed twice-over if you were. I’d appreciate if you’d keep me updated so I can avoid that, actually." She doesn’t mistake the mirth in his expression now, though his tone still sounds the same.

"I think I won’t. Makes more sense to keep you in the dark so you don’t ‘accidentally’ kill me," she deadpans.

Levi snorts. "Seems like you’ve recovered your excellent wits enough to leave this filthy pigeon’s nest then?" His attention departs from her as he runs his finger over the headboard of her bed. "The horses will be ready at dawn," he says distractedly and immediately scowls as he inspects the dust that returns stuck on his finger. Mikasa thinks she sees a muscle in his forehead twitch.

She has to turn her head and cough to suppress a laugh. When he declares his departure very abruptly after, she smirks at his retreating back.

The freak.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this whole thing started out with my own exhaustion with human relationships and then grew. I wrote an extra small piece just for myself to hear, but if any of you are going through what Mikasa is, I'll leave it here too. Otherwise, I should post pretty regularly for the beginning. I like to be ahead in writing before I post, so it's usually just me editing, filling in parts or seeing if everything fits together in the meantime. The best scenes are already waiting in the shadows...! Thanks for reading!
> 
> (It’s scary. To have all your actions be self-motivated. You hold responsibility for what you do. You cannot fall back on the safety net of saying it was for the sake of someone else. It’s scary to realise you don’t know yourself enough to know what you want. Or how to separate yourself from others. You let them intertwine with you and read from them your desires. Let them go. Do not think of them when you go forward in life. There’s a baser instinct within you that calls in your own voice and no one else’s. Let it call. Let it call. Listen.)


	2. A foot in, beyond the line

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally, this chapter was attached to the previous one but I separated them in case it got to be too much to take in. So, here we are!

Harvesting tea leaves, Mikasa finds, is not the laidback task she had imagined, but it is not exactly backbreaking either. At least, not for them.

The owner of the plantation is an old man in his sixties who lost the last of his family years ago. Moving out toward the sea was the brave, uplifting step he needed in breaking away from the static life he had lived in the inner walls. Though he takes naps frequently throughout the day, he pulls his weight just enough to scrape by. When Mikasa had appeared behind Levi, and was introduced as ‘extra help,’ he had been appropriately ecstatic.

They’d been welcomed to the plantation by a wide grin, and shown first of all to the house, which was placed adequately far from any plants, a windy strip away on a hill facing east for the best view of the sea. It was cosy enough, with two bedrooms, one the old man’s and one for them. He hadn’t seemed to realise the blunder—that one single-sized bed, though relatively spacious, was not enough for the two of them—but they hadn’t pointed it out either.

Mikasa had discovered Levi’s habit of sleeping in chairs one night of the many they had shared a space together with the squad, and she hasn’t forgotten. She expects him to claim a chair somewhere in the house and Levi himself had left no room for doubt when he’d made no comment on the situation.

Upon having had relinquished their baggage in the room, Mikasa had found herself taking on the duty of answering the plantation owner’s inquiries into their journey when Levi had gotten side-tracked, unwilling to be sociable as he’d scowled all throughout his inspection of the cleanliness of the place instead.

She’d replied that it was ‘Fine. Refreshing,’ and she hadn’t been lying. The journey here hadn’t been too laborious despite a fortnight’s worth of spiralling into resignation. Riding beyond where the cluster of houses grew scarcer, were in various states of construction, to where the ocean air overtook any human traces, and any establishments were few and far between, hadn’t been so hard as long as she’d kept dormant memories buried and focused on Levi’s back ahead of her, trudging ahead on his horse. Never mind how she had ignored her own reminder that he was a companion on this trip of theirs— _not_ her leader anymore.

When they’d refused the rest the old man had insisted they take, he’d brought them to the plantation and taught them all the know-hows on tending to and harvesting a tea plant, on top of turning the leaves into their eventual brews, and a good selection of ones, at that. Holding buckets of leaves is not their definition of a good workout, but assessing the quality of a leaf is a ritual which asks of them more care and less brutish energy. It is deceptively draining but therapeutic at the same time—not how they are pouring hours into manual labour that won’t flourish into much beyond someone’s teacup—but the reality of being forced into thinking of little more than leaves and their age, aroma and colour.

When they come close to baring near all the plants on the plantation, the owner doesn’t back down when he insists that they retire and replenish their energy. As they head on back to the house first, Mikasa can’t contain her restlessness. She is not physically exhausted in the slightest and she feels the need for some mental stimulation after discovering the peculiarly disarming nature of the work she has just signed herself up to for the next few weeks.

It’s by staring holes into Levi’s back, walking ahead of her, that she mulls over whether to exercise her excess energy away through asking him to spar or foregoing decorous things like fairness altogether and creeping up on him instead.

It might be years since she has directed bloodlust toward him, but he is not the type of soldier who turns rusty with age.

So it is fitting, enables him to live up to his moniker and all, when he shifts his head to the side and catches her swinging fist in his palm in the same instant he says, "Regret it that bad, huh?"

She huffs as he turns around to face her, discards her fist back to her side with so much force that her whole body slides back on the dirt. It annoys her that his stance is so open, like she isn’t worthy of his defence. But the more logical part of her knows that it is how he defends the best, by showing no tells and adapting to the situation with superhuman agility to catch the enemy off-guard.

"I don’t. I just…just need this right now." She refuses to overthink things; what weeks here could and should entail. The exact way she should expect to be ‘fixed.’ So she stands straighter, makes herself open too to let him know that she wants to receive his pain. It’s not the healthiest distraction but it’s the only one she has ever afforded herself.

"There are better places than between lanes of thorny-ass bushes," he scoffs and proceeds to roll his eyes so Mikasa chooses this moment to charge. He finally tosses all his weight into the tips of his feet to evade her fist to his stomach and snaps his leg at her open flank. Her following grunt is preceded by his bored drawl, "But I guess you’ve never cared."

It is what she needs to hear to become one with her element; his understanding of the unbridled riptide of pure energy that surges within her that is finely attuned to her emotions where her mind is not. She finds that she is grateful he knows her so well, that she can rely on him to respond in kind to her violent whims. Within the flurry of their quick movements, she must let the mirth show somehow, because he falters and she lands a blow that she fully expects to knock him back a metre or two, but instead just rocks him back on the balls of his feet.

Not a normal man, her mind reminds her.

His eyes aren’t even blown with adrenaline. Instead, his drooped eyelids seem to speak for how fed up he his—most likely with the dirt they have kicked up that is no doubt clinging to their sweaty bodies. Levi is always eager to clean himself when he can afford the luxury. As far as situations where his cleanliness must be postponed for the greater good of humanity go, Mikasa’s mood swings don’t quite cut it.

He doesn’t hold back in releasing his own frustration on her and she takes all the force he gives her into her body, counters and blows equally satisfying her aggressive thirst for action. It’s when they could almost say that they are too outmatched for each other that Mikasa swipes her hand out too wide in an effort to change the rhythm and cuts her forearm on the scraggly thorns ornamenting the bushes that enclose the dirt path they are on.

Her swing still hits bluntly into his shoulder but he stills his own movements, says, "Watch yourself," before meeting her defiant eyes. Her lips are pursed and her stance still looks very much like it is in motionless action. He could almost smile. "Had enough yet?"

It takes a few moments before she lets her brows gradually unfurrow. The sound of her own pants return to her ears. "Thank you," she murmurs, head tilted sideways; the picture image of her head catching up to the insane speed of her body.

"Sure thing," he says, then turns on his heels and strides what little is left of the path up to the house.

\---

Mikasa doesn’t see him for the next hour or so during which she unpacks her things in their room, changes clothes, and flops down on the bed. She feels like it has only been a minute since she rested her eyes that Levi returns to the room, hair wet but still combed neatly. He regards her with a scowl, unpleased at her perpetuating unkemptness, but otherwise ignores her as he begins to unpack his own things.

She shrugs it off and goes back to napping, hoping to drop right into the pits of unconsciousness and elude any wayward thoughts. Right before she is about to fall asleep, she feels a cool touch at her arm. She opens her eyes and Levi is sitting on the edge of the bed, lifting her forearm in appraisal of the cut she earned herself an hour prior.

She watches him but he doesn’t meet her eyes so she closes her own eventually too, wondering why he is taking so long. She feels him trace his finger parallel to the cut and it is then that she realises that it extends under the bandage around her wrist. She sits up abruptly.

Her other hand reaches to clasp around his, as if to stop his exploration of the area. She doesn’t move his hand away, but stills it with her grasp.

"You need to treat it." His tone is no more plain that it always has been, but his words make her feel like a child.

She ducks her head and stares at the cut for the first time. It’s deeper than she thought. "I…I can do it myself."

He lingers beside her for a short moment until he pushes off the bed. His hand slipping through her hold is the jolt she needed from letting her thoughts spiral. "Alright."

Instead of moving to unwrap the bandage, she watches as he begins to tidy the room and wipe all the surfaces within it. When he is done, she thinks he is about to go retrieve a broom to begin work on the floors, but instead he crosses the room to the armchair in the corner beside the window and lowers himself into it. It faces the bed so his eyes meet hers until he surprises her by shutting them instead of reprimanding her for not starting on taking care of herself.

It would be unnerving if it were the past, her commanding officer settled in the perfect position to watch her like a hawk, but only if she had not discovered the humanity that lies beneath his façade and all his actions he had made in the name of it. Just as there is a part of him that is invincible, there is a part of him that cares, hell, maybe even loves.

So he faces her now because he cares, she knows. And she is okay with that. What’s stopping her from unravelling the bandage now is another kind of obstacle.

"I’d only ever willingly shown it to Eren."

He doesn’t open his eyes and she is grateful for that. Still, she keeps her eyes fixed on the sliver of skin exposed by the neckline of his shirt, just under his clavicle. It is easier to talk to than the full intensity of Levi’s eyes if he decides to open them.

"My mother said to keep it hidden. To show only the right people. On that day….was showing the ambassadors the right choice? I…I don’t know for sure if they’re who my mother meant by the right people." She looks down at her wrist and rubs over the area where it is ingrained in her skin. "I’m not sure about a lot of what this tattoo is supposed to mean anymore," she delivers the confession with her signature wispy tone that has always sounded a little bit melancholy. It is fitting for her first verbalisation of the indecision that has plagued her for the past two weeks, of the fate that lingers above her head, ready for her to grasp at a moment’s notice.

She doesn’t expect him to respond, but still the silence sits awkwardly, so she ventures a glance up at him again and he is already looking at her. His gaze is calculating, eyes narrowed as he weighs her words on his mind. His clean appearance and tidy features have always made his intelligence seem easy but it is the first time Mikasa envies his fluency of thought.

"Would kicking me out of the room make you more comfortable?"

The question sends her mind reeling because if she truly thinks about it, she is tethered to this man too; their surname is like another half of her that is just as important. He is not her family but he is proof that they existed, the cause of why she doesn’t have to shoulder that proof alone.

After a significant amount of time spent deliberating, she shakes her head. "No. Can you help me treat it?" She has never been so forthcoming to ask for help and that part of her hasn’t changed since the war. When she asks him to help her it is for the sake of extending a hand in peace offering; they have never talked directly to each other about their mutual pasts, but in the wake of the offer proposed to her, she finds that making something else of this tattoo other than a symbol of her royalty, her rarity, is something she can afford. Why not let it be an olive branch, when the purity of its origins has long since been tarnished?

He nods his assent and crosses the room to collect the tools necessary while she slowly begins to unravel the soiled bandage. The cut extends all the way past the tip of the tattoo but does not slice into it. It sits beside it, the blood half-hard and dark red.

The dip in the mattress beside her alerts her to Levi’s return from bandage-hunting. He holds a wad of cotton drenched in alcohol in his hand but makes no move to treat her. She looks to him but he is staring at her tattoo instead, mouth in a slight frown and a crease in his brow. She doesn’t realise the reason for his uneasiness until she shifts her arm from her lap to hover above his. His face is instantly freed from the tension that struck it and he wraps his fingers around her hand to support the weight of her arm.

His grasp is gentle. Like he’d been worried about touching something sacred.

It ruffles something both light and heavy in her chest. She is taken aback and can’t seem to move past the feeling, her consciousness in a dazed wonder even as she watches him run the cotton over the cut, disinfecting it. When he lets go of her to fiddle with the bandage, ready to wrap it taut around her wrist, she discovers that she is touched by his handling of her, because he bestows her honour solely by the way he treats her body.

Yes, he has been rough with her when she asks for it, but when it is most crucial, he forbids his own forwardness, tames the brute strength in his fingers, and gifts her the gentlest of touches that restore the tattoo from its sacrilegious misfortune.

"Done." The announcement shocks Mikasa out of her reverie that she isn’t fast enough to collect her thoughts and fix her lost expression.

Levi holds her wrist until she gathers it back to her lap herself. He watches her do so, then, still seated beside her, he turns his head away from her. "It’s some sick joke. That we don’t know which choices will bring regret until we have committed to them. But the world is significantly less messed up now. Your choices aren’t between life and death anymore. It’s new to all of us."

He turns back to look into her eyes and she feels a multiplicity of divides allocate the spaces in the room. His eyes are steel, hardened by always having to let go what little warmth he lets in. He is brutal truth and undelayed acceptance. He looks at her and she can just imagine what he sees: her naiveté bleeding through her eyes; always hoping for her own selfish fantasies to come true. Too attached in a broken world when no one should have been.

They are both on opposite sides of a delineated line where one step over to the other side could have very well led them to perish.

And then there is the divide between the living and the dead that haunts their daily lives. Somehow, they sit together on this one end, and she won’t sooner die to receive the answers from those on the other side.

"The only one who can validate the choice you make is yourself," he echoes.

It’s grounding. Levi has never minced his words so on some occasions they only had the effect of pushing a grim reality into begrudging hands. Which is why it makes it even more incredible that the man to whom no one ever turned to ask for liberation from plain, cruel actualities, can accomplish the feat of finding her mid-air, suspended in directionless flight, and return her to the earth in his own familiar downward trajectory that has always deterred so many.

Mikasa hasn’t stopped looking wide-eyed into his gaze, which seem to read into the fluctuations on her face until he is satisfied that she has understood. Levi is the first to break their bind when he rises and his hand finds the broom in the corner of the room as naturally as two magnets unite.

Her head drops, the scene before her distracting her from her thoughts, and her eyes land naturally on the fresh bandage around her wrist. He is the second person she has shown of her own volition. And she has gained so much more than she could have ever imagined she would regret.

Those partial to this not-so-secret of hers are the two men she would follow blindly, who remind her of her family in so many ways, but aren’t quite.

So she holds onto that. The tattoo is her faith and devotion to people she trusts in lieu of the family who cannot be with her here today. She holds them as high as she would her family.

And so, if, for one night at least, the tattoo wondrously makes sense, she lets it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The scenes I always think back to when I'm writing their characters is Levi's last talk to Erwin, and Mikasa's emotional reactions when she talks to Eren. I feel like there was so much to unpack about their characters there, lots of nuances and depth, but then they also have this duality of when they're with other people. They're not one-dimensional at all, so I tried to fit in all the kinds of responses they have had to other things, into here in a way that works out when it is just them two. 
> 
> I guess an important reference for this whole fic was in the manga, particularly when they revealed her tattoo/mark and everything that happened around it. There was so much room for her to become more of an individual, and it leads back to so many different avenues like her past and all, which is why I chose it as the kind of impetus of this whole thing. I'm gonna flesh everything out so this may be long, we'll see. Next chapter is pretty much written, just gotta fill in the gaps! Getting heavier...


	3. Fog of my waking hours, take me there

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ready? Pretty hefty on Mikasa's thoughts in this one. Warning, she is sad and working things out. But there is someone looking out for her. Mhmm, exactly what you're thinking.

Earning the trust of the plantation owner is a progression Mikasa finds herself thankful for, as moving on to more technical procedures like hand-rolling the leaves after aeration demands more of her skill, and hence, focus.

It has already been a week since they’ve arrived here, and she finds the routine of work somewhat comforting, however toned down it is a life compared to the military. More surprising, she and Levi fit around each other better than she had expected—not because she had expected them to clash—the rapport they had before is somehow being exceeded along with the amount of time they have spent alone together.

They collaborate well on the plantation with all their soldier’s discipline and spar spontaneously outside of it, whether that’s before the meals they share together, or after they retire to the room they share for the evening.

They eat the same meals, and fall asleep in the same room. It’s no wonder that they find themselves giving little pieces of themselves to each other in all the off-moments that can fit into a day.

Some intentionally, like when the old man had managed to ruffle her feathers by probing into her love life, and Levi had appeared beside her instantly, placed a hand on her shoulder until she’d cooled down.

And some less so, like the time she woke up in the middle of the night, and somehow found herself privy to a sight so rare she had never realised she had never seen it until that night: Levi’s sleeping form.

Mikasa hadn’t meant to stare, but it was one of those nights when she’d woken up too early, completely untired, and Levi had fit into the stillness of the lifeless furniture and the white-noise of the early hours. He had been far more compelling to look at than anything else, his features so rarely peaceful until they too turned as blank as the wooden walls and wardrobes, and she had fallen asleep again, head resting on her knees hugged to her chest.

If he caught sight of her that way, he made no comment, however incriminating the position could be if read into. Mikasa has never seen him wake up so she hasn’t a clue what he does, just knows that he is always already fed, showered and dressed by the time she opens her eyes.

It’s definitely a return to older times—when she had always had a team of people around her, people she trusted with her life and lived her teenage years out with. But also to before that, when the companionship of two boys was everything she needed, and she fell back on their company, their presence ever promising and soothing.

After a year alone, maybe more years than that bracing for this cursed solitude, Levi’s appearance in her life is the closest thing she has to the company she had become accustomed to; it is consistent even when she does not request it. Mikasa can wake up at some ungodly hour, and have there be warmth on the other side of the room, have there be life and an actual beating heart if she just crossed the divide and pressed her ear against his chest.

She doesn’t take it for granted, but she also doesn’t know what to do about it.

\---

However much she is grateful for Levi’s company, after a day’s of work he leaves her alone when he washes up as soon as he gets back to the house, and she usually spends that time changing the bandage on her wrist for a fresh one. It is in this short allotment of time, that she faces her demons alone. And spirals.

It’s like the tattoo means different things every single day. One day, a source of comfort, the next, a wound that smarts. She’d managed to fight off the wayward thoughts all throughout the beginning of the week, Levi’s words and kindness weighing on her mind more potently. But by the end of the week, she cannot help it.

Whenever she does not think of him for a period of time, the hollowness within her comes back greater than before. The insignia on her wrist can mean so many things, but today it taunts her with thoughts of Eren.

He had never made a big deal out of the tattoo, and so many other occasions which had meant the world to her, but he’d cared on his own terms, with his own timing. It had never failed to drive her insane with affection.

It’s a near-impossible thing to overcome because the space she made for him within her is so large, overtakes almost all her body, that the hollowness born of his absence is equally as gaping. Mikasa has not kept track of time since…then, but she’d sunk to abysmal depths and it wasn’t until one day quite recently, she found herself wading instead.

By some strange turn of events, she is at the ocean with Levi. _Captain Levi_ , humanity’s strongest. _They must make quite a pair._

She feels the routine tug from below and she knows she shouldn’t take it, but she is alone, with nothing to distract her in a room much too deceptively empty like her own.

_No, they are not invincible. But they could very well be indestructible._

_Which is the more unfortunate fate, really?_

Cursed as he was with shortened mortality, Eren never lost his zeal. He fought tooth and bone every day, didn’t waste a second for remorse or regret—slept and bathed in his anger—and his passion had only tripled once he’d learnt of his fate. Sure, it bore a new face but it was even plainer to see.

Is that what it feels like? To live like you won’t see another day?

It’s no wonder that so many fell out of tune with his actions. Yet so many of those very people fell before Eren did. They must have expected it too. Everyone had been prepared to wake up one day thinking it would be their last, so what makes them different?

Was it hope? They had hope that they would see the war through to the end whereas Eren was not so foolish to think he could outsmart a curse. To Mikasa’s dismay, he hadn’t even wanted to. It grips her all over again—the anguish and renewed grief—that she wishes she could hold him, keep him in her arms until he revived again, the only phenomenon she would ever consider a miracle.

She sees his honest scowl, his emerald eyes, expressive with life, hears his gruff voice, but she does not. She doesn’t at all and she has to will for that fact to not swallow her whole.

She keeps her mind occupied with images of the new maturity that had attached itself to his expression in the end and can’t find any trace of solemnity in it. There must be an indescribable joy then, which accompanies being liberated from all duties performed in the name of one’s own future.

Well, he’d secured the futures of the people he’d loved, and that would’ve been a part of his future too, wouldn’t it? He’d decided to efface his future, already aware of its conclusion, and distanced himself far enough to shoulder the blame, to protect the only people relevant to his world. That was still selfishness, yet somehow he’d been fully content.

They’re the same, really, in that Mikasa has been extremely selfish. Except she feels like she’s trapped herself worlds away from feeling anything like what Eren had.

All because she lives and breathes in the moment, and the present had always dealt her pain. Somehow, Eren had been granted foresight and it’d impassioned him.

The future she can see is undecided and blurry. She doesn’t know what to make of it. She doesn’t know if she can reach it, weighed down as she is by moments like these.

All she knows is that she will keep waking up, day by day, because this is _her_ curse. She is fated to survive and she’s only just figuring out how to do that for herself.

_The lucky ones, right?_

\---

It might be after another week passes, nearing two, that Levi suddenly announces he has errands to run for the entire day, leaving her to her own devices with the old fart.

(It reminds Mikasa that she should probably ask for the man’s name, considering how long they have stayed here already, but he seemed to take well to the nickname, assuming it casually as a badge of familiarity. Now that she must weather a whole day with the old man knowing she _will not_ call him that, it troubles her. But then again, there are more pressing matters.)

She wants to ask him where he is going but she finds that not an inch of her body wants to move. She simply sits on her bed, having been awoken by him only a few moments prior, eyes fastened to his back as he moves about the room. He would most likely answer her, but by the time he slips out the door, dressed in a white shirt and blazer, her mouth is still shut for some reason she can’t place.

She swallows it down, unwilling to untwist her thoughts when there are already too many tangles she can’t even begin to sort out.

The day passes as usual, except the man who sits beside her, rolling leaves expertly, is called Fran, she finds out, after an inquiry lacking the shameful preamble she is perhaps well-known for _not_ being known for. He converses with her more than Levi would, though they have considerably less history between them. Fran loves talking while Levi would merely take her company in stride, the silences and the occasional inconsequential banter.

They have not talked about the past at great lengths. Both aware where not to traverse at all, and which areas will require more time and a potent veil of privacy. Mikasa is not well-versed in reflection on matters so recent, but there is something startling about the way her relationship with Levi is so different from hers with Eren.

Before she can figure out what exactly that is, Fran takes to talking again. “Mikasa, dear…now that I have you alone, I’d like to take the chance to apologise. I didn’t mean to fluff your feathers that time. I should learn to tackle my curiosity, really I should, but at my age everything seems wildly entertaining. Beyond proportion, I’ll say.” He chuckles amusedly to himself then continues, “Anyhow, you two must’ve been going through a tiff.”

He must be referring to the time he’d managed to upset her by bombarding her with questions about any lovers. The interrogation had only made her think of Eren and he didn’t know him, nor did she mention him. So Mikasa finds that she can’t make sense of his last comment. “What?” she mutters.

“You know, you and mister grumpy pants.” His fingers continue at their dexterous work while Mikasa’s still.

“Oh.”

He smiles, satisfied. “I assume everything’s all better now, that’s wonderful to hear. Oh the thrills of courtship…” he grins wickedly, revealing more gaps than teeth, “….might be rough now but I’d go back if I could.”

Mikasa is thoroughly confused until she remembers how Fran hadn’t batted an eye when he’d assigned them a single room. She flushes. “We’re not—”

“None of that,” he fans his hand at her dismissively, “there’s no fooling these eyes.” They are eyes which now hold a specific glint in them, that she’s certain now that he must have had a penchant for deliberately creating mischief that has survived through the years.

It’d be troublesome if she cared for games. “I’ve known the delinquent since I lost all my stock to him in a bet. I should’ve known better, really. I’d thought he’d only cared for tea. Maybe his ragtag gang of ragamuffins. But that was lifetimes ago. I see how he treats you.”

The corners of Mikasa’s lips begin to droop but Fran takes no notice. “I’m telling you, dear, you can trust me. I know that urchin all too well.”

“Not well enough,” Mikasa defends, then goes back to rolling the leaves as a means of ending the conversation, deeming it incomprehensible that she has managed to find herself in competition over who is more familiar with Levi in the first place.

Fran only pauses his actions for a moment before he resumes expertly. “I see. Forgive me, dear. Perhaps I’m too invested in my own memories. I see myself and my old flame in you two but that’s a stretch, ay? You’ve both got your full set of teeth, don’t you? A dreamer, that’s what I am.”

He begins whistling, like he does when he works alone, his opting to do so with company only fuelled by a social adeptness that recognises that Mikasa will not be speaking to him again today.

For some reason, she’s not satisfied with the consolation. She ought to be more at odds with his conclusions, but some more dominant part of her cannot stand that someone might know Levi better. Sure, for longer, but not better. It’s a part of her that is new and foreign, likely didn’t exist at all before this trip, and she’d rather be caught with faulty gear than admit it exists.

But her justification is a logical thing that is made even easier to embrace by how she knows that anyone on their squad would answer the same. It’s a simple truth; no one raised in the inner walls could ever begin to understand someone from the underground. Someone who had fought the titans, lost friends and half of their sanity beyond the walls.

No, it wouldn’t be some merchant whose thoughts had only been occupied with profits, running a business for the rich who had lifetimes upon lifetimes guaranteed for them. It sits uneasy in her stomach, the mere thought of it.

She wouldn’t even dare say that it could be her. 

They might have gone through a lot together, but he had been appropriately distant. So much his own person that no one really knew how to get in. There were some hints of his affection for them all that made the ground he provided for them a little less cold; a warmth you could cling to but never breathe a breath about.

In fact, there are vague memories of when that boundary between Levi and expressing attachment began to blur. But it all happened around the end of the war and the immediate aftermath—when she’d been too preoccupied over other matters, then too devastated over…

Amongst the tears and dark rooms, there’d been plenty of faces. This one patting her head, stroking her back, that one letting her cling, gently pushing spoons between her lips. All gazes weighed down with their own level of grief—which they’d good-heartedly tried to keep of their faces for her—but nonetheless all pitying. Except his.

His gaze would’ve seemed unaffected to any stranger, but not for lack of understanding. No, that was what made them how they were, his eyes tired and emotionless. He’d gone through this over and over. Anyone would think the pain would amplify, but he just learned to accept it better each time, remake himself as someone who could survive without the warmth of that person, this friend and then the next, until he became a person who didn’t know warmth from the outside, forget anything from within.

He’d been there. Stayed. Hadn’t force her to do anything. Not even to clean herself up. She’d never been unnerved by his stare, like she’d heard others say they were, can remember looking at him for a long time that day. It’s hard to recall, precisely because it is a day that is wedged among many that build into a period of intense distress. But there’s a more than real possibility that it could’ve been then.

Now that she can pinpoint when, brief flashes of the day cut through her mind.

She looks up, suddenly self-conscious. She can’t be in the presence of someone else right now. Her hands disengage with the tea leaves. She’s done more than half of her share. Fran’s whistling which she had been tuning out, filters back into her ears, stops, when she stands up.

“I need…” Mikasa announces, distractedly.

Fran inspects her once over, supplies, “…a break?”

She nods. He dismisses her easily and she walks briskly, letting her legs take her where they may, mind operating at full capacity to keep the memory of the day at the very top of her head, where she won’t forget about it but also can’t unpack it, until she finds somewhere safe to think about it.

They lead her to the porch of the house. She evaluates that it is private enough for the moment. She seats herself on the edge of the platform and clenches the wood between her fingers and palms.

A breath. Distant waves morph into—

_Cheers. Mikasa can still hear cheers outside when he arrives but she is already numb to the noise. It could mean a lot of things. She doesn’t want to investigate to find out whether their happiness is in celebration of their fate or something inherently more unkind. Not unreasonable, not at all, they’ll say. She’s heard the worst of it._

_It’s all white noise now._

_He plops himself down under the window. One arm rests propped on a knee. He is casual and she is splattered on the floor. The by-product of a general lack of energy to pluck herself up from the floor, and stiff muscles begging to be stretched after hours of hanging her head in her hands, legs tucked to her chest._

_Weak. Incompetent. Helpless._

_Everyone who comes are not like the people outside. They’ll never say it in so many words, but she can read it in how they coddle her. To be on the receiving side of that attention invites memories she cannot bear._

_So it’s less a mustering of energy, but a continuation of her despair, which endows her the strength to lift herself up and sit in front of him, posture however slack, limbs limp and disconnected from her centre._

_“I’m not hungry.”_

_“Did I ask?”_

_A flicker of irritation licks at her gut. She hates that, how he’s trying to act indifferent. Why the hell else would he be here?_

_“You could break my bones and force me. That’s what you do, right? Cruel things for the better good.” The words are what spill from hollow shells, she thinks. Empty people, who are sentenced to speak sarcastically after suffering a hurt they do not recover from. Pitiful, she once thought. But even though she regrets it when she says it, she can’t bring herself to feel apologetic at all. You reap what you sow, was that how it went?_

_“It’s not my business if you want to starve.”_

_She doesn’t blink. “I could die.”_

_His eyelids droop in what resembles boredom, but most definitely isn’t. “Do you plan to die on me?”_

_“I—,” she releases a breath punctured with so many shudders she expects him to grimace at the sound. He doesn’t._

_Mikasa has too many solutions. Too many solutions that expired the day things spiralled beyond what her sacrifice could resolve. In the end, her life was a mere thing. Worth multiplied by a hundred a not, it all ceased to matter in a single instant._

_“He did well,” he says instead. Instead of anything else which he, of all people, would have the right to say and she’d let him get away with. Maybe, even truly listen to._

_The three words make Mikasa’s heart clench violently. It’s too easy, too simple, when it’s anything but. She reaches to claw at where she can feel the raw physical reaction to his words, except her hand doesn’t find her own chest. She crushes it into the fabric of his shirt, right where his own heart lies._

_In the decade they have known each other, it is the first lie she has ever heard him tell._

_‘He did well until he didn’t,’ would be a more accurate statement. Even in death lies no atonement—they know that all too well. After all, devils at rest are on no occasion mistaken as angels._

_She meets his even gaze with her frantic one. They both know that it’s a lie. It’s no coincidence that it’s a lie she needs to hear. Her resistance to her own feebleness crumbles at the seams as the tears return. They swell at her eyes, fixed by the knot in her brow. Her own emotions are at odds with her ethical judgment, which makes it all too confusing to sort through it all. But underneath it all, there is one thing that persists, pure, preserved and undestroyed._

_"I still wish…wish th—," she manages halfway, words strung together by clenching her throat tight until her breath hitches fiercely as a sob overtakes her. Her whole body trembles. Her palm flattens over his chest and that finishes the sentence enough._

_It would create more problems that it would solve but just one day of peace is all she asks. Let her have one more day in which she could love them. She’s lived her whole life so far-off from the way she wanted it, even one day could redeem it all._

_Levi is still. Under her quivering hand, the only indicator that he is even present with her at all is the even rise and fall of his chest. The steady rhythm that beats out and reaches her from underneath layers of stubborn muscle. When even that is not enough she looks up at him and searches. Dives within his eyes and swims, searching for what, she doesn’t know._

_The cheers fade away. Time evaporates like giant masses of flesh that haunt them night and day. He doesn’t touch her once. Only spares her his flat stare that tells her a million things at once. He lets her hold his heart, like one day she will become as strong as him—as alive, in the bewildering fashion he has survived through all his tragic miseries._

_In between the breaths and sobs comes the faint whisper of ‘Captain’ every so often; a plead that is the refrain in a chorus of grief. Be my Captain again. Say it again. Just like that—that you’re proud._

_Because she can pretend, at the very least, that half of it meant something when everyone else has long since moved on. The most significant things reduced to inconsequential blips as history moves toward the present, swallowing everything whole._

_In this room at least, there are eyes which hold her without once touching her skin. He knows, he knows, even if the rest of them don’t. And isn’t that enough? If the strongest person she knows can understand her, there’s something there worth more than what she does not have._

_She searches and searches, and in an unfamiliar turn of events, she finds._

It’d be embarrassing to remember—how she had sobbed so openly in front of him—if she hadn’t needed it precisely that much. It hadn’t been the first time, anyway. Levi doesn’t do comfort the way that Hanji did, but he is far from incapable.

It’s funny that he’d surpassed a boundary this day yet had acted no different from how he usually does. The only difference had been that she had touched him. Perhaps for the first time, so intently. He had been warm.

It reminds her of how she had pressed her ear against Eren’s chest so many times and heard life, felt love rush through her.

Then she solves the mystery she had been contemplating before Fran interrupted with his apology.

If she was trying to intertwine her soul with Eren’s, Levi reminds her of her boundaries and fits around them effortlessly. He always had been, and he still is.

(Warm).

\---

By the time she returns from finishing her work on the plantation, Levi still isn’t back. Something sits uneasy in her stomach and her throat develops a lump, like she has too much to say but has not been given permission to speak. Her lips naturally assume a frown.

She goes through the motions of preparing for bed and doesn’t realise until she is about to settle into it, that her bed is made when she does not remember having done so. More conspicuously, a square tin sits in the middle of it.

It is most definitely Levi’s doing. The tin of tea leaves and the bed. The design on the tin is colourful and foreign while the words spell the name of a tea she has not heard before.

As she moves to the kitchen to prepare it, she realises she has been working at a tea plantation for two weeks now and has not even had a sip of the tea she is producing, or any tea, for that matter. Just goes to show how many years she spent in a state of blind dedication. And perhaps, it also discloses how the small comforts she prefers are less physically indulgent, and more emotionally soothing. 

Once she has steeped two cups of tea, she sits at the dining table, and waits. Mikasa deduces that Levi must have gone out again, if he is not in the house now. The night has fully settled in, cloud wisps sit still in the sky, and the moon shines bright and full. She’s sure he couldn’t have gone very far if he said he was only going to be gone for one day.

When the steam from the tea dies down, swirls lower and almost disappears, she finally decides to take a sip. It’s entirely unlike what she would expect Levi to drink. The floral scent is just that; not sweet or bitter, but fragrant, and it seems all-too delicate on her tongue. Light and not too flavoursome.

Mikasa’s hands are warmed by the cup but the heat is quickly fading. She reaches across to measure the heat of Levi’s cup when Levi walks in through the door, slightly unkempt, but only to his own standards.

“I made tea,” she blurts at his sudden entrance. She has already accepted that he’ll reject the offer and go wash up instead, but he approaches the table and settles into the seat across from her.

“Thanks,” he says, as he meticulously organises his grip around the cup and raises it to his lips. Never mind that she should be the one thanking him.

“What have you been up to?” she asks as she surveys his face, assesses that it is composed though there are hints of liveliness hidden behind his mask of weary indifference, despite what must have been a whole day’s worth of engagements.

“Got back from the city a few hours ago, left again to pick up my slack from today.” That explains the casual clothing, then. She thinks to ask about the tea, but the lump in her throat is still very much present. There are words but no place to eject them, so she ends up sipping her tea again instead.

“I met up with a few old faces,” he continues, placing his cup down. He swirls his finger over the rim. “I ran into the squad. Say they’re going to make it over here for a visit soon.”

The news is a welcome diversion. But it warms her as much as it invokes a hint of sadness within her. They might be the only people left she trusts most in the world, but the friendship had not been maintained thanks to any effort on her part. It took a while but she’d stopped rejecting their invitations, let them in and shouldered whatever they had in store, but she had not once extended any.

“I’m glad,” she says, and something small within her rejoices that it isn’t a lie. If it sounds like one, it’s a different story altogether.

Levi doesn’t pick up his cup again, scrutinises her instead as she takes more sips of tea. It makes her seem eager to finish the tea with how long she has kept it raised to her mouth, taking the smallest sips in-between breaths. 

Still, Mikasa doesn’t put the cup down because it just happens to be the perfect setting, the perfect timing and point in the conversation to discuss what they have so adeptly avoided.

She knows he wants to say something, it’s just inconvenient that it happens to be one of those things that they have little experience explicitly initiating. It sits in every room, measures out to be the weight of every action, but it cannot find itself ever voiced.

How do you begin it, really? He’d seen her in a more pitiable state than any old half-devoured corpse, so how would he begin to talk about the weight that had buried her alive in the first place? If he wants to address the way she has shut everyone out, it will inevitably lead back to what began it all.

It takes her mind back to this afternoon on the porch and she has to actively refrain from staring at him. She knows she might find what she remembers was there, but that had been because he had been willing to show it. Mikasa wishes she knew what to say, knows that the lump in her throat is intrinsically linked to the way she has offered him so little.

But this, too, falls under the realm of topics she is not eloquent enough to instigate discussion about.

“I’m glad, too,” Levi relents, gruff and faint into his tea. Mikasa watches him tip it all back with her empty cup now far from her face, sitting on the table. Just when she thinks to ask him about the tin of tea on her bed again, Fran trots into the kitchen, mumbling something about being thirsty.

Levi and Mikasa sit in silence while Fran fills a cup with water. When he turns to leave he catches sight of the tin of foreign tea in the middle of the table.

“This…” he proclaims, examining the box in one hand, “…is one rare tea. Is this what you went to do in the city, Levi? There are certainly remedies for trouble sleeping which are easier to attain. Won’t object to this one though. Damn effective and close to my heart.”

“I don’t remember handing it over to you, old fart,” Levi says, dryly.

He ignores the twinkle that lights Fran’s eye. “Oh, you’re a loyal one, aren’t you?’ His musical intonation and playful grin are such an offset to both Levi and Mikasa’s characters that Mikasa is for a second, diverted to the display.

She watches the exchange like she is buried into the very back of her seat. Has to will herself to stay looking at the old man, even when the image of his smile gets buried under all her questions when she processes what is being said, all because she can’t bear to look at Levi now out of fear of the enormity of her own curiosity.

“To tea,” Levi replies, curtly.

“Of course. Why else would you be here?” Fran hides his smile under the guise of finishing his water, which he does so unhurriedly, between asking for Levi’s evening progress at the plantation before hopping off to bed. 

Mikasa struggles to not squirm in her seat. She isn’t looking at Levi but she can’t imagine that he is looking at her either. She opens her mouth, and curses the breath which escapes. It is too loud that she is immediately forced to follow-up. “Have you not been sleeping too?”

She meets his eyes, just because she wants to seem confident, and the competitive part of her withers at how he regards her calmly. “I never really do.”

 _He never really does._ _She knew that_. So it goes unsaid, that she should also know that she couldn’t sleep and he barely does. They are sharing the same room, so what _hasn’t_ he seen, would be a better question. He’s most definitely seen her asleep in the mornings, why didn’t she think he would see her at night, eyes wide open toward the ceiling, nose buried in the red cloth she only takes out when she goes to bed and folds away safely right before she falls asleep.

She should’ve expected it, yes, but in none of her estimations would it lead her to expect _this_ , as a result.

Her façade of confidence teeters. “It’s good. I guess I ought to thank you.” Maybe a few years prior, her words would have been said through grit teeth, more likely not at all, but in the present she finds herself fighting off a blush. It’s unbidden and she hates that it’s there so she certainly does not keep her eyes on his face.

Levi rolls his eyes. “That’s unnecessary. Think of it as a taste of the effort you’re putting in.” He proceeds to pour her more tea as she slowly lets her eyes travel back to him.

The renewed steam, as he pours the hot water into her cup, fogs the space between them. The plume of white curls shift and rise right before his face, kissing the elegant arch of his nose once, but he shifts back leisurely, as if he weren’t stung. Stubborn.

He is tough, Mikasa notes, though his features are so delicate. His normally bored look contorts the sensitivity with which the singularities of his face seem to have been constructed. It is like the plume of smoke eradicated all the hardness with a single touch, the gleam of his eyes behind the smoke less like steel and more like deep, deep water.

It’s an effort, it is, to not drown. Within moments the steam dies down, and her mind is more serene, somehow. The effects of the tea, she supposes. It makes her problems seem smaller, easier to touch and grasp.

“I can’t say if this is just a distraction or not yet. But it’s helping,” she finally admits aloud. _You’re helping_ , she doesn’t say.

His presence, throughout the whole trip, as her former commanding officer, as a companion, as someone who cares, sitting right across from her, is as soothing as the tea itself. It makes her wonder exactly what she is to him. Decides that there is an imbalance that is most definitely her fault. “It’s a better way to live, I guess. You were right.” He deserves that much.

But he has never been one to bask in gaining credit from others, so now that the lump in her throat has vanished, she finds she has the energy to smile at him.

The whole room is warm, immersed in steam, and her whole body fits into the scene from the inside-out. It’s also why the brief flicker of something vibrant passes almost imperceptibly over his eyes, but finds a place in the room just for itself.

He looks young and she feels older than she is. It’s strange but somehow, it is a reality. Not the one she’s been battling out in her head.

Levi flicks the tin then proceeds to get up, “Better go to bed while we still can.”

Mikasa tries her best to chase it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter we get more action! A well-deserved reprieve from all this thinking!! We'll be moving more forwards now, instead of backwards with all this reflection. But there will still be reflection, yes, of course. No escape.
> 
> Also, I was treading carefully...with everything going on with Eren, considering the latest chapter. I'm gonna leave it more ambiguous, like I had planned to, but now that I know more facts, I need to stop myself from weaving them in completely. It's tough!


	4. Dancing in the dark, set alight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I had a lot more planned for this chapter but it's already pretty long...which means the next one will be extra fun! Or too long. For now, enjoy! Ignore the chapter title, it really says...date night.

The small tin of tea leaves that Levi brought back is halfway empty when Mikasa makes an announcement.

She is cleaning the room of her own volition, to Levi’s surprise, but he imagines that it is some misguided attempt at an obligatory farewell gesture. It leaves him with nothing to do except mentally envision how he will compensate for her unsatisfactory efforts. The way that Mikasa handles the broom is too careless for his liking, but she has wielded a death grip on it for the past twenty minutes and seems like she has every intention to continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

So he rummages through a cabinet until he finds a bandage and begins to unfurl it, seated on the bed—the only place her gloved hands, agents of cross-contamination, have not touched in the entire room.

“Did you hurt yourself?” Mikasa asks, turning from her tasks to peer at him.

“No. If you’re going back, now’s the time to try knock some sense of hygiene into you.” He considers his words and tuts. “Not that I haven’t been trying this whole time,” he adds, fixing her with a glare, unimpressed. And then, counter to his exasperation, she finds his well-guarded kindness. “This is for you.”

“It’s healed.”

“Still gets filthy.”

“It’s fi—“she begins, only to shut her mouth humorously quick.

Levi watches the inner conflict play out in the strains of her mouth until she resigns with a frown, whips off her gloves, and plops herself down beside him, evidently choosing to go along with what he says out of the obligation she feels toward him. An extension of the logic that led her to initiate this whole solo cleaning fiasco.

It’s a good thing she thinks she’s doing a good deed. It strengthens the resolve of Levi’s patience. How many times in the past twenty minutes has he had to clip his tongue before any rampant admonitions could spill forth? Mikasa, on the other hand, has apparently been feeling impatient. The hasty mopping is one thing to go by. The way that she moves her arm into his hold without any of the preamble that preceded the previous time, is another.

Levi accepts her arm readily, anyhow, less wary of applying too much force on an injury that has already healed. It’s only the second time he’s done this for her, but he already has a process to commit to. Make quick work of the old bandage. Make sure his fingers don’t skirt anywhere near the tattoo when revealed.

Speak too, to make sure he doesn’t get too absorbed staring at its intricacies. Or worse, meditating on its unfathomably solid weight that far exceeds the mass of Mikasa’s muscled but slim arm in his grasp. “Why the rush? It’s actually more counterintuitive than you think. Not patting any horse’s asses until two days from now, right?”

He finishes harnessing the bandage together but Mikasa still hasn’t spoken. Levi lowers her arm from mid-air into his lap. It finally captures her attention. She whips her head towards him, but his returning stare is more inquisitive than expectant.

“Sorry, did you say something?” His fingers seem to have moved quicker than the other time he did this, but Mikasa can’t be sure. Her headspace is too busy, thoughts of things she has to do running in circles, urgently bustling to the forefront of her mind every day only to be returned back to the vicious cycle of tasks every night, unfulfilled.

It’s been like this for more than a week now. Ever since the implications of Levi’s gesture of goodwill, a wearisome trip made specifically to remedy her insomnia with a specialty tea, fully sunk in.

The same tin of tea that is now on its way to running out.

She brushes past the sight of his mouth opening and charges on, “Levi, I…wo—”

“The tea shop is a pain in the ass to find but I’ll leave you instructions. Take the tin with you so they’ll know what you want.” He pauses, considering her. “And ask them to recommend you something else if this one’s not doing its job.”

The words she finally dislodged from her throat sit motionless on her tongue. She has to defy all her instincts to gulp them down. “Okay.”

He looks at her for a moment longer before nodding briefly. On his lap, his hands open from their grip around her freshly bandaged arm.

It’s all Mikasa needs to get the words out again.

“I won’t go,” she blurts, “In two days. I…want to stay a bit longer.” Under Levi’s keen attention on her, Mikasa hurries to add, “We haven’t really explored the area. Though the plantation is doing well now.” Her last sentence trails off when she sees Levi’s brow lift.

“Brat, with your brilliant timing for throwing punches, you could’ve convinced me.”

She opens her mouth to object but finds that she cannot argue with that. In their second week here, they managed to disrupt the tour of the area Fran had cordially been leading for them by lashing out into a spar.

It was an impetuous move on her part as the initiator, she’ll admit, but they’d been wandering too close to the sea. Each step closer accompanied by a sound, a voice, linked to a memory, attached to a person. She’d been taken further away from triumph over the emotional warfare in her head and had it returned to a state of constant turbulence, worsening as the sight of the sea took residence in more and more of her vision.

Now, she knows she wouldn’t do it again. But then, nothing could’ve changed the course of her fist launching into the back of Levi’s head. The consequences are a quicker and altogether, different story. Fran made himself scarce, Mikasa directed Levi away from the sea with the planned trajectories of her blows and they stumbled into exhaustion’s arms in a location they never gave Fran the chance to identify. Self-navigation back to the house which lasted close to two hours, is what Levi refers to when he suggests they have completed the exploration of the area Mikasa never got a full taste of.

“That’s not—you’ve been deciding where we spar now lately anyways.”

He looks down at her arm, folding his fingers once again into where the cut has now turned into a soft, pink line. “Right, no more getting lost like little brats.”

Mikasa nods. Then, suddenly conscious that her arm has been in his lap for longer than necessary, she begins to slide her arm out of his grip. His fingers glide down her arm as they are, pressing into her skin as she retracts it, following the line of raised flesh, almost fully healed.

It’s strange that the words are silent but bolder than usual. She holds her breath, hums in agreement.

 _No more scars_.

“You haven’t been back then.” Levi prods the bone in her wrist as he meets it, prompting her. When his fingers skim the beginning of her palm, he removes his touch completely and looks up at her. “To the ocean.”

She shakes her head. She hadn’t been ready. Clearly hadn’t been even a week ago. Levi is aware of this, she knows. This is something he does; pry people open with the words they would never say aloud to themselves. It’s easy to mistake such a method for manipulation, but Mikasa is aware, too, that those he nudges like this only speak easily because the words are ready to spill from within them.

She isn’t foolish and she isn’t playing into his hands.

It’s faith in him—that Levi will make her keep her word—which is why she allows herself to say, “But that’s not all. Sasha and Eren and Armin...I can find traces of them here. I think they would want me to find something here,” she admits slowly.

It’s a fine line she walks between living vicariously—in the most twisted way, living out the lives that the dead would have led, or wanted her to lead—and living for herself.

But tiptoeing this edge is much like standing on the walls again, blades in each hand, skirting the brink and always, always being ready to fall. Within her hands, the power to assert herself. In her feet, the capacity to stumble. Fumble between these lines she could, but if it is how she finds her path, then so be it. It is as easy a sacrifice as any other. 

So it’s a fact; the ocean does not entice Mikasa without the ghosts of these people to haunt it. But truer yet, there are other things, too, that make her want to stay.

“Is that what you’re here for?” she returns, mindlessly, then has to wonder where the bravery comes from to ask. She is most likely emboldened by her own heap of trust, freshly thrust into Levi’s hands. “The ocean?”

“The novelty has worn off,” he answers easily, but skirts his eyes away from her along with the open planes of his chest. Like that, he closes himself off from her and the message is simple. Take any answer you can get and make a run for it. She should. But she can’t help that it is not what she wants to hear.

She stares ahead at the mop abandoned on the floor before them and does not pry further.

Instead, Mikasa drops her hand beside her lap, holding onto the bed. It makes contact with both the outside of her own thigh and Levi’s. Her awareness of it somehow makes her fidgety and puts her at ease at the same time. She wants to retrieve her arm from his vicinity. She wants to press closer. She wants to raise her hand to release green smoke into the sky and give time the affirmative signal to forget them and go on ahead.

It’s a mind-boggling additional brand of tension to their interactions. Mikasa isn’t sure if it’s always been there but it is something she only began to notice after Fran’s teasing of Levi that night he gifted her tea.

It’s there, harmless and not at all pervasive, in the way she goes more silent than usual after overhearing Fran direct his teasing over their supposed relationship at Levi instead. The pitiable part is when it converts her actions into act; a hopelessly see-through veneer of deliberate nonchalance coating her rigid movements in Levi’s presence.

It’s there, more evident and ironically, soothing, in the curve of Levi’s palms fitting into the naked skin of her ribs and the crook of her neck, a touch delivered to her so intently she embraces it for what it seems to be in the moment—affection—before the split second ends and those hands turn forceful, laced with power, and their session ends like that, Mikasa defeated with a throw.

Most noticeable, however, it exists like a jolt of palpable friction between them when the single pat he delivers to her head to wake her up each day recently has her entire being invigorated in an instant; his eyes catch hers, and she is ready for something to happen. A fight, banter, a lesson, something else. As long as it is between them.

Mikasa has to wonder if he feels it too, if it cuts into him as deep. Because wherever it reaches into him, she thinks that the answers he keeps to himself can’t lie much further. There must be something she can do to extract them from him.

Trying to understand Eren has become a lesson engraved on her for a lifetime. Approaching someone so similar—more enigma than man, she can recognise that unlike Eren, with Levi there is another layer of an unmistakeably physical wall between them to be breached. Levi’s is a more foreign body than Eren’s to Mikasa but she feels impelled to coax the answers out of any nook it may tumble free from.

His throat. His fists curled during sparring. His…images of his presentation during these sessions—the more deliberate kind which call for clothes to be shed beforehand—are summoned unbidden.

…The entire map of his scars?

“Seafood,” Levi declares, unfurling the cross in his legs and standing. “Not Marleyan standard but the locals are getting there. Tell Fran we’ll pass on dinner tonight.” He walks to the middle of the room, speaking over his shoulder, “That exploration enough for you?”

Mikasa has to double back to fully realise that he has made a suggestion to her. She opens her mouth twice, closes it once in-between before she has collected herself enough to answer. “Yes.” Upon weighing the implications of dining out in her mind, she’s glad that her mouth managed to voice the right choice. Sasha would approve, if anything; it sounds like a start.

She’s also glad that she took from the moment what she could salvage—a resolve to _know_ Levi in any way he will afford her—because too soon he is halfway across the room, his hand back at the disposed mop.

“Now that I don’t have to sit back and let you try thank me…Mikasa. This is for my exclusive use now. If you want to do it, try harder than the piss-poor job I just saw.”

Her mouth twitches.

“Are we clear?” he enunciates.

Whether it’s in nostalgia or excitement, she cannot tell.

\---

As it turns out, Mikasa does not, in fact, sufficiently consider what dining out entails.

When Levi finishes his second round of sterilising their room, in a state that can only be described as half-possessed to Mikasa, he shuffles toward his side of the room and lifts his shirt over his head.

In spite of her earlier musings, Mikasa’s eyes do not roam. They stay affixed to the tense set of his bare shoulders until he explains himself.

And the explanation is simple.

“Get ready,” he says, procuring a crisp white shirt from his stash of neatly folded clothes.

When it comes to following through on that explanation with appropriate action, Mikasa is more inept.

Since arriving at the plantation, she has foregone her long casual skirts for attire more suited for the practicalities of labour and sparring; pants and a button-up. Effectively, soldier’s attire. The sight of a soldier dining at a restaurant was rare in the past, but is even rarer now. The numbers of the military have more than halved since occupations dedicated toward the advancement of technology and expanding habitable areas have surged.

There is no part for her to play soldier, nor an ex-one, at that.

To further complicate matters, Levi keeps his back to her as he pulls the new shirt over his shoulders and has the audacity to say, “I won’t look. Put on something clean.”

Considering she reciprocated no promises of the same nature, Mikasa stares for a number of reasons.

One, while Levi is not what she would call a reliable reference for a dress code, (given his unwavering inclination toward formal attire) she doesn’t want to be underdressed for an event she can actually admit she’s looking forward to. If Levi should dress in his immaculate ensemble, she’ll fit right in by taking it down a notch or so.

Two, they didn’t do this. Almost a month together, but they have never ended up changing in the same room. In the mornings Levi is out first. At night, the washroom preserves their privacy. Only during the war had situations like this been inevitable.

So while it isn’t as if Mikasa isn’t used to it, it perplexes her.

Her bewilderment is to account for the tour of her wandering eyes, observing the shirt pulling taut over the defined expanse of his shoulders, before they meander upward to the back of his head and find their destination. One that nowadays, seems more and more predetermined.

His eyes are distant as they peer out the window, and they stay vacant as he buttons his shirt closed.

A simple sum equation: Levi is distracted. He slipped-up. As for the answer, well, Mikasa doesn’t know why.

\---

Now sitting opposite Levi at the restaurant with a stretch of time to wait out before their extravagant lobster dishes are served, Mikasa is still left grasping at straws. Especially since Levi had reinforced his guard once again when he caught her staring in the reflection of the window.

She squirms in her seat at the lingering embarrassment of the moment. Then, they’d been on the same page. Shock. Not entirely discreet but just subtle enough to not warrant any words that could fill in the awkward shift in the air.

Eyes locked, her hand had snapped to undo the top button of her shirt, the soldier in her finally reacting to his command, before promptly turning to select something to wear.

The dress she chose is a pale blue number. It’s made of a thin fabric, chiffon, which cinches easily at the waist while the skirt drapes elegantly over the outline of her legs. But apart from the way it softens her silhouette, it is unornamented in any way.

Casual. It feels unusual, she hasn’t worn a dress since she was a child. There had never been a lull in despair in her life for her to don something so leisurely, something she associates with women from the inner walls, with women who care for their appearance, with mothers.

It’s almost certainly the reason the waitress, pregnant herself, had taken one look at them, and tucked them away in the corner of the establishment. A candle was lit between them, and before she left she’d spoken warmly with a hush, “Here ya go. Away from ‘em boisterous bunch. Take your time and enjoy your evening, eh?”

As Mikasa runs her finger over the unfamiliar neckline of the dress, she feels her chest begin to flutter. She begins tracing a path from her clavicle to just above the centre of her sternum, meeting skin where there has always been fabric. It’s too intimate, warm, dimly lit, and she feels too feminine secluded in this quiet pouch with Levi.

It’s a shame because she wants to enjoy this. The dress she’s wearing is one that Sasha chose for her the first time the squad visited Marley. She remembers Sasha’s boisterous whooping, immediately unleashed as Mikasa emerged from behind the changing screen. The maternal gaze of the shopkeeper who had told her, “You look lovely, my dear.” Sasha’s dazzled eyes as she finally articulated her thoughts, “Mikasa! It’s very flattering!”

Sasha would appreciate this night. Her rare attempt at sprucing up, the lobsters, her company that is founded on years building up a close-knit familiarity. Why should Levi be any different?

One once-over at the man in question and it’s clear to see that he feels divisions more comfortable than her. He sits with one arm slung around the back of his chair and his face is removed of all the heavy shadows that so usually strike it, in the glow of the warm light. He is, to all perceptions and impressions, taking this in stride. But then again, what was that earlier this evening? His thoughts…has he ever laid them out on the table?

Mikasa runs a finger over the handle of her cup and watches the motions of her hand intently. It’s something she’s never done in battle—stall, before she fires her shot. “I wonder why they all do that.”

“Do what?”

“Act like we’re…together.”

Levi flicks his eyes down to her hand, stilled on the rim of the cup. “Who else has? That old—”

She nods. She doesn’t realise she’s nervous until she gulps and hears the sound of her own throat contracting. Loud.

“Why ask when you don’t need explaining?”

She looks up at him. The candlelight flickers in the whites of his eyes, warming his neutral but notoriously stony stare. It’s compelling. She can feel the beginnings of what is them two falling back into their old dynamics. A soldier listening duly to her superior’s words.

But it’s new—all of it. The topic she has somehow breached. Her own fair share of curiosity. The intensity of which had crept up on her covertly, like ill-advised adversary, until she found herself the target of a surprise attack, and her instincts had launched forth before all else.

More inevitably, Levi’s answer will be a break from the past. Because he’s different, Mikasa decides. This is not how it would be with Sasha. She can’t say why but she can feel it in the way her whole body grows restless in his presence, anticipating he will say so in his own words. But most of all, it’s Levi’s gaze just for her, she realises, nowhere to be found but here, softer than she remembers it.

Or maybe, the ambience provided by the lighting is all to blame. She’s never really seen him in any other setting than those imposed by duty, life and death, or comradery, has she?

Uncategorised, yet they both know which one this could be.

She watches the flame dance intently as it bounces of off his irises, sparking against cobalt blue flecks as he shifts his gaze from her to the other diners.

“It’s a gift we gave ourselves, Mikasa. To not be recognised foremost as heroes for our kill counts, that is.” Levi collects his arm from the back of his chair, and gestures to the people around the room. “Sheltered guys like these will look at us and decide which fairy-tale fantasy of theirs we crawled out of, because we gave that to them too. The answer you’re looking for all comes down to one thing.”

He overlooks the scrunch in her brow and delivers his words looking straight into her eyes, face serious. “Peace…it’s not exactly hard to gloss over the repulsive technicalities when you have that veil. The same goes for the old man.”

Mikasa recognises this pattern. It is one which occurred so frequently around Eren where she would offer up her heart, not to the corps but always to Eren, and be hit with the reality that was Eren’s confusion, or frustration, his aloofness. Of course, what she offered to Levi was nothing as grand as her heart, just a detachable wedge of her mind, but the feeling of having her expectations dampened by reality still feels the same.

It’s lucky that she’s conditioned herself too, over time. She’s so used to the world literally crumbling at her feet that a mere pebble dislodging from a stone wall will undo the deflated curve of her spine and completely rejuvenate her defences, if only for a while. It’s what unfolds now, but somehow she has faith that this courage is more than temporary.

Levi registers the shift in her posture and mulls over his next words. The lobsters they ordered slide onto their table in the meanwhile, off of the arms of the waitress who bids them a friendly wink. Mikasa stares at her. It’s a conflicted thing that she now feels at the gesture after Levi’s words. She mutters a thank you under her breath before the waitress leaves.

“What I’m saying is you don’t have to play hero here. Playing into their delusions is enough to have them accept you like you’re one of them. That’s why.”

Mikasa’s attention returns to him at that and stays, deliberating. He waits for her to speak but decides to start eating when she bows her head in thought. She reflects on his justification as she collects her hands around the cutlery, willing the words to come as promptly as his do.

Her grip tightens when they arrive. “But we’re not—you’ve said so before. That we can’t go back to before we made our hands...” The silverware in her hands feels too familiar. It flits through her mind against her will, an assessment of the establishment and what she knows they could do in the shortest of seconds with these tools. Weapons. How they could do the same without them.

“Yeah, I have. And I know that you accept that too. Look, I know neither of us cares about being a good person.” His head tips to the side. “No, my bad. It’s a damned currency we couldn’t afford,” he corrects, tone acerbic but voice perfectly level. “But don’t be mistaken, Mikasa. This is what we fought for.”

She grimaces. “To let it be forgotten that we’ve murdered?”

“To let others believe that twisted world never existed.” Levi twists his fork into the lobster flesh and wedges out a considerable chunk from the shell. Though the length of space between them is less than considerable, Mikasa’s face remains dry; blood, she notes, does not spray.

Mikasa doesn’t know what to say. She wants to ask too much. Levi has a way of giving others exactly what they need of him, without giving anything of himself. It’s selflessness, sure, but it’s also incredibly isolating. _Is that really why you fought? Is that why you accept peace so much better than me? Will you tell me why you’re here?_ None of these questions know the way out of her mouth.

Between making headway on consuming the lobster and sipping water, something less pressing, but nonetheless burdensome, slips out.

“It’s hard. To talk to them.” She knows he is not wanting for examples.

“You have others. Connie…Jean.”

“Right.” _Do I have you?_ She feels like they could be on the brink of it, if he let it. “They’re coming soon,” she mutters, more to herself than him.

He meets her eye over the fork full of lobster rising to her mouth while swallowing himself. “Fran not your preference for company?”

Her hand sinks back to her plate and she inhales a breath of air, ready to voice her irritation. She stops, when her eyes land on his smirk.

Small, barely a trace of mirth.

Nonetheless, enough to put her in a better humour. “He said he knows you _well_. After he said that I…ignored him the whole afternoon. Ran away for a few hours too.”

Levi huffs, amused at her smug smile. “Thanks for that. The old fart deserves it.”

She contemplates him as she chews on her lip. “So do you.”

What follows surprises her.

When their eyes lock in the moments when Levi awakens her, there is an unspoken acceptance between them that what follows will play out as a competition of sorts. Challenging the other to do something. Breathe the first words. _Breakfast’s ready._ Show any form of shock. Move away too fast. Blink.

When it happens now, Levi loses willingly and it has her scrambling. For the first time, his gaze falters but it feels like she’s the one who’s been bested.

“I mean it. It’s the same, isn’t it? He’s from the inner walls.” People who wouldn’t recognise the smell of blood if they tried. Its heat on the skin. Its coolness much too shortly after. “Only we ca—only we…would know.”

He is slow to return his gaze to her but when he does he settles his head cocked on his hand and takes his time studying her. The moment feels too long. She spends it studying his face in return but knows her expression is not as utterly still as his. She twitches in all the places she invites anxiety to enter, as it bubbles within her. Was this something else they didn’t do? No, if it were Sasha in Levi’s place she’d have said a lot more, she knows. She knows.

Mercy is a low hum that infiltrates the space between them and shrinks it down until all her senses are arrested by a single sound. “Yeah.”

Once again, his eyes glow, as if he is absorbing the heat of the candlelight purely by the laws of attraction. Warmth flocking to infiltrate the space of its antithesis: cool, stone blue. Mikasa reminds herself that this is her first time in such an ambient restaurant. Yet already she has decided that the lighting’s peculiar stunt here, casting an atmosphere as tangibly tender as this, is second to none.

“You’ve done me a great service,” he says.

And for a second Mikasa has to break the spell. She takes a moment to digest that more than the dress, the fine food, their proximity, it is Levi’s words and his reception of her own, that make them fit into this establishment as the complementary pair outsiders see them as. The other elements are materialistic, what pervades the space around them is decidedly not. A pouch of their own may not have been necessary to begin with.

Somehow it’s easy, surrounded by a room full of guiltless civilians, for two sinners in the corner to blend into the space, as encapsulated in their own small world as they are.

Mikasa follows the line of his vision as it eventually falls down onto the table. Her gaze is stuck and she doesn’t know how to move it. Levi doesn’t resume eating again. She closes her eyes to alleviate her senses.

“However, you should know, Mikasa…” Levi begins, and Mikasa notes that she was right. He sounds the same in the dark. Even without the outside world messing with her head, his voice is softened at the edges. “You don’t owe me anything. Everything I do is more for my sake than you think.”

Her eyes fly open. “I don’t agre—”

“You’re right,” he cuts her off. “There was a reason I came here.” He inspects her briefly before he continues, “The only thing I’ll tell you now is that it’s changed. Because _I_ wanted it to. Got that?”

“I…understand.”

Levi nods, then picks up his cutlery again. “The rest I’ll tell you in time.”

It’s a vague explanation but she doesn’t trust herself to give him anything other than a neutral answer. Sure, she wants to dig deeper and Levi won’t run from something he doesn’t want to hear, but no matter what he says, he deserves to be on the receiving end of support. Mikasa can’t do that for him yet.

So she waits. Her meal is more palatable knowing that the knife she wields is not a weapon but merely a tool. With the potential contained in her hand, she has made an incision on Levi thicker than the tension between them, deep enough to have touched some articulation of him. _She has him._

A pebble from his walls, an imprint on her skin that’s quick to fade, a sole street on a whole map that could be read off his body.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.


End file.
